Victims
Robert Richardson
© Robert Richardson, 1997
Robert Richardson has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1997 by Victor Gollancz.
This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
For James
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Preface
Although he was the first to be shot, Benjamin Godwin died last because the heavy leather saddle he was holding partly protected him. But as the storm of shotgun pellets hurled him backwards, stray ones striking glittering orange sparks off cavities and goitres of black and dulled silver flints in the barn wall, the gunman was convinced that so old a man could not survive. He left Benjamin bleeding on scattered straw, his mind vandalized with pain and helpless fear.
Mandy, Benjamin’s ten-year-old grand-daughter, ran to her death, shouting in alarm as she raced across the poplar-shadowed farmyard where hollow echoes still seemed to roll among startled, squawking chickens. She shrieked as the man came out of the barn, then the second shot turned her primrose T-shirt scarlet and she was dead before her body had completed its jerked puppet somersault through the air.
The first thing Annie Godwin saw as she appeared in the doorway of the kitchen was Mandy, lifeless by the tractor; the last was the figure less than fifteen feet away, practised fingers thrusting fresh cartridges into smoking barrels. Too stunned to react, even to scream, she stood totally still for the final seconds of her life, shaking her head in bewilderment and pleading. Then it was as though she almost welcomed what happened because reality could not be borne.
With the angry, rash courage of thirteen years, Thomas died in the kitchen, kicking, fists lashing out at the destroyer of those he loved, a hopeless valour from a raging heart that would have been irresistible if matched to a man’s strength. After the first explosion he had rushed to the bedroom window, from where he had seen his sister shot, and had heard the death of his grandmother as he dashed downstairs. There had been no thought of running away; the Godwin metal in him had been steeled as long ago as Ypres and El Alamein, even in the desperation of Corunna, and, like his father’s, his hair flamed with the Hood temper. Thomas fell defiant, like ancestral warriors before him.
Ears clamped in foam headphones filling her half-asleep mind with Abba, Cheryl, the children’s mother, did not hear the first three shots from outside, but twitched and cried out as the fourth blasted through the house. For a few seconds she lay dazed and petrified with shock on the tapestry sofa, then was scrambling to her feet in panic as the gunman ran into the sitting room. She flinched in terror as he raised the gun.
‘No,’ she begged. ‘No … please. Where are my children?’
She screamed and backed away as he moved towards her, half stumbling against a pie-crust table, regaining her balance only for him to hit her across the face with the gunstock. He took a fifth cartridge from the pocket of his denim jacket as she moaned at his feet; she had seen him more clearly than any of them. Delicate glass in the teardrop chandelier tinkled violently with the last bellow of death.
The anonymous white van left twenty minutes later, loaded with silverware, an early landscape given by the young John Constable to his friend Matthew Godwin, a pair of eighth-century terracotta Chinese figures, a basket-hilt Toledo rapier and a German headsman’s sword, a gold goblet used at the coronation of George IV and thirty pieces of rare porcelain, including a vase said to have been designed by Josiah Wedgwood. In the wide, vacant tranquillity of a barley-tanned Suffolk afternoon, it appeared to be the only moving thing, rocking frantically as it tore along the straight, stone-pitted access road that ran from the farm, pale dust swirling behind it; it reached the gate and tyres squealed as it swung violently left, then there was a grinding clash of gears and a raging growl of acceleration before it sped away.
As silence settled on the farmyard, chickens began to peck scattered seed, nervously stepping away if they approached Mandy’s body, and a pair of crows settled on the gable end of the farmhouse roof. In the barn a distressed horse whinnied at the scent of blood and pounded the wooden walls of its stall, seeking escape from Benjamin’s dying presence. In the kitchen the stench of burning fruit, put on to cook for cold summer pudding that evening, rose from the copper pan on the Aga. A game of computerized slaughter flickered on the television monitor in Thomas’s bedroom to a background of repetitive synthetic music, and downstairs the phone rang, chirruping for a minute before it stopped. More than two hours later Benjamin Godwin died beneath the oak cattle manger that his great-grandfather had built.
All this happened between 1.42 and 4.30 on the afternoon of Wednesday 11 July, 1990.
*
Early the following morning Sam Pulfer, one of Benjamin Godwin’s farmhands, arrived to be given his day’s orders and saw the bodies of Mandy and Annie. As he stared, he was conscious of a sense of human absence amid the chatter and bustle of poultry. He cautiously approached the child, the sight too grotesque to accept until he was close enough to see her blood, flecked with greedy iridescent blowflies; he felt a compulsion to wave them away, their swarming presence an additional obscenity. Before he reached Annie he recognized that she was lying in a position impossible for a living person to maintain; her eyes were still open. Now unnatural hush carried the menace of evil, and he had to thrust down a shudder of fear as he entered the kitchen. The Aga had gone out, heat transformed into the acrid smell held in the cold, blackened crust roasted into its iron surface. Inquisitive and nervous, a powder-blue budgerigar repeatedly hopped from bar to swing and back again in its cage suspended from the ceiling by the window; it was the only life in the house. For some reason it was the sight of Thomas, face twisted with dying fury, that was impossible to tolerate; retching with revulsion, Pulfer spun away and ran back to the open air.
When he recovered, he felt convinced that whoever was responsible was no longer at the farm. Forcing himself not to look at the boy’s body by the kitchen table he went back inside, terrified of discovering Benjamin Godwin — he owed the farmer ten pounds and felt irrationally guilty. The telephone was in the hall, so he did not see Cheryl.
‘Police.’ The act of starting to tell someone brought up an immense wave of shock and pity. His voice cracked into a desperate croak and he began to cry like a terrified child. ‘Hurry … Tannerslade Farm … near Finch … please … they’ve all been … Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Help me!’
When the first patrol car arrived, they found him halfway down the path, from where he could see the building but not any of its horrors. He was sobbing uncontrollably. He had three young children of his own. For more than a year afterwards he was unable to sleep without the aid of drugs and all his dreams were hideous.
The final paragraphs of a report in the Observer, Sunday 2 September, 1990.
Five pine coffins, two of them heart-breakingly small, were borne from the church amid a great gathering of hushed mourners. With slow, solemn dignity they
were carried to the sunlit patch of grass beneath looming yew trees where the opened earth waited to receive them, deep, grim pits softened by bright garlands of flowers.
Sombre men lowered the coffins on canvas straps — Benjamin Godwin and his wife together, their daughter buried with her children — as the vicar, voice firm with a strength governing awful grief, pronounced the church’s promises for all those who die in the Lord. Bewildered by the mantle of sad ceremony, a little girl gripped her mother’s hand for reassurance, and a farmworker, uncomfortable in an ill-fitting borrowed black suit, lowered his head as he shook with sorrow. During the final moments of private prayer the hum of television cameras ceased and all that was audible was birdsong and the soft crying of a baby.
Then it was over and people turned to each other to offer comfort of word or caress. The vicar stood immobile by the graves for a few moments, then went to speak to those closest to the victims before quiet black limousines bore them away. Finch, which had seemed totally stilled since daybreak, returned sadly to its placid rural life, harrowed by death and an insufferable Suffolk afternoon.
For reasons of space, the reporter’s final paragraphs were cut:
Senior officers leading the murder inquiry had joined the mourners, and opposite the lychgate of the church three men and two women watched everyone discreetly but intently. It was an agonizing reminder that whoever violated Tannerslade Farm is still out there somewhere. Nearly six weeks after the killings a massive police hunt has brought no arrests or the emergence of a real suspect since Cheryl Hood’s estranged husband was cleared of any involvement.
Whoever murdered Benjamin Godwin and his family also destroyed an innocent community’s sense of security, a belief that brutality only occurs in dangerous, distant cities or in the excesses of fiction, where violent death does not bring such real and terrible anguish.
*
Coal-black and moonlight silvered the river slid silkenly beneath Clare bridge, the hollow wooden knock of moored punts curtseying softly against each other on undulating water the only sound until bell answered bell as clocks marked three o’clock in the summer morning. Apart from the two figures on the sloping bank the Cambridge Backs were deserted, chapels and colleges like abandoned civilizations awaiting dawn and discovery. Lying with his hands locked behind his head, Giles Lambert raked through the remains of a childhood passion for astronomy as he gazed up at remote constellations: Lyra with bright blue Vega, Cygnus and Draco, ancient Greeks in limitless space. Randall Jowett sat beside him, elbows on raised knees, thumbnail stripping bark from a twig, concentrating as he tried to invest the pointless with importance, in an attempt to hold horror at bay. Only his 21-year-old pride prevented him from crying.
‘Why did you kill them?’ Unshed tears stained the words, his voice dared no louder than a painful whisper in the silence.
‘Does it matter?’ Lambert sounded bored, as though he had already explained something several times and Jowett was being perverse in not understanding. He felt irritated as another name remained just beyond the rim of memory, glimpsed but indefinable as the most distant stars. ‘Anyway, I had no choice. When the bloody elastic on that mask snapped he saw my face.’
‘But you killed all of them! Including the kids! For fuck’s sake, did you get a kick out of it?’
Lambert looked reflective, as though the suggestion was novel but intriguing. ‘Perhaps I did. I certainly couldn’t stop once I’d started.’
‘You said that sodding gun wasn’t loaded.’
‘Well it was.’ Lambert nodded to himself as the name came back: Cepheus, father of Andromeda, containing eight stars above the fourth magnitude. It was a brilliant night, residue of the day’s clinging warmth held beneath a pinpoint-clear dome of black; a night to spend with a consenting girl, not the panicking man beside him. ‘The important thing is that nothing went wrong.’
Jowett laughed bitterly. ‘Except that five people are dead.’
‘We can’t do anything about that now. But everything else went perfectly. We weren’t seen and our alibi’s rock solid. Nobody’s going to connect us with it.’
‘Jesus.’ Jowett’s head sank between his knees, as if cutting out the sight of Lambert, the dim-lit walls of the colleges, the river, trees and grass, even the sky and the night itself, would somehow allow him to return to how things had been before it all began. Before he had hired the van; before they had found the farm; before Giles had written the initial outline; before that night in the Gog and Magog when they had lingered over halves of bitter, all they could afford, resenting the fact that they were permanently, embarrassingly broke, joking of ways to raise money — an official university brothel, kidnapping the vice-chancellor (abandoned because no one in their right mind would pay for his return), fixing the Boat Race — until Giles had suggested a robbery …
*
‘OK, we’ll start with the moral arguments in favour. “All property is theft”.’
Randall laughed. ‘Piss off. Marxist-Leninism isn’t cool any more.’
‘Thank you, Karl. We’ll call you if we’re interested.’ Giles used humour a lot in those early stages, making what they were contemplating more acceptable, somehow lighter. ‘Very well, unreconstructed capitalist running dog, answer this. How much does a man need to be classified as obscenely rich? A million pounds, ten million or a hundred million? Candidates must select only one option.’
‘A million.’ What Randall’s father had speculated he could be worth within five years until a series of high-risk investments had imploded and real debts had become as massive as fantasy fortunes.
‘Ergo, if a man has two million pounds, you can justify taking half of it off him. He remains very rich and everything’s insured anyway, so he gets back what he’s lost and is no worse off. But the thief s lifestyle has been greatly improved. Finally, there’s no victim.’
‘What about the insurance company?’
‘Bollocks. They’re investing billions all over the world. They can make fifty times what they’ll pay out in a couple of seconds.’
‘But somebody pays,’ Randall argued. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch, yeah?’
‘Sure someone pays.’ Giles was dismissive. ‘A bunch of peasants get ripped off or have to work in a Far East sweatshop. Are you bothered about them? If you are, go out and change the bloody world. I’m talking about us, about the fact that we’re so broke we can’t afford a Big Mac without worrying about paying the rent. We’re not used to that.’
*
‘Supposing we get caught?’ Jowett found himself analysing his motives for the question the moment he asked it. Was fear of capture terrifying him more than guilt? If they got away with it, would he start to rationalize? What sort of person did that make him?
‘That was always a risk. It didn’t bother you before.’
‘But we’d just have been done for robbery. Not … not this.’
‘We’re not going to get caught. Why should we be?’ Lambert sat up. ‘Just hang loose, OK? Take it a day at a time … You’re not really thinking we should admit it, are you? What’s the point? They’ll lock us up and throw away the key so that society can feel better. But they’ll still be dead. Our lives will be ruined and nobody will be any better off. Get real.’
His calmness, acceptance, skill at argument was a balm for Jowett’s fright and shrieking nerves, a hiding place from conscience. He could have stopped it at any time, and regretting now that he hadn’t was as futile as wishing the sun could be moved back or the endless flow of the river reversed.
*
Once the decision had been made — and Randall recognized he had finally been willing, not coerced — the first stage proved temptingly simple. They were looking for an isolated house at least fifty miles from where either of them lived; East Anglia had almost suggested itself. They drove around the countryside south of Bury St Edmunds spotting possibilities, but not knowing if they contained valuables worth stealing and, if so, what security protect
ed them. Then, when they stopped at a village shop because Giles wanted cigarettes, he returned with a county magazine, bought on impulse because it might be useful; inside was the article about Tannerslade Farm. Owned by the same family for generations, obviously with money. One photograph showed the woman with a Georgian tea service, a Constable hanging on the wall behind her; another, the man holding a fifteenth-century Spanish sword, glimpses of silver and gleaming porcelain in the background, plus a comment in the text — ‘a farmhouse filled with secret treasures’. How had they let them publish an open invitation to be robbed? Perhaps they were simply trusting, this defenceless elderly man and woman living alone.
They located the farm on an Ordnance Survey map and drove past just once, but slowly enough to take photographs through the car window. It stood about a hundred yards off the road, sentinel Lombardy poplars behind it, at the end of a straight stone-rough track with ragged grass growing down its centre, lined on one side by a hawthorn hedge. Adjacent fields lay fallow or were growing what looked like barley. In the few minutes they observed it, no vehicle passed them in either direction and the only other building they could see was the roof of a cottage glimpsed in a dip of land half a mile away.
Giles developed the photographs himself — ‘People have been caught because they were dumb and sent things like this to the local chemist’s.’ Slightly blurred images emphasized the farm’s solitude. They examined them with a magnifying glass, plotters trying to assess peril or opportunity, but all they identified was a window which appeared to be the one from an interior shot in the magazine. The fact that they now knew which was the main living room brought a sense of achievement.
*
‘I’m going to be sick.’ Jowett swayed as he stood up, then lurched down the bank, grasping an overhanging sycamore branch as he doubled over with the excruciating effort of trying to vomit when there is nothing in the stomach to expel. Lambert looked away in distaste at the sound of tortured gasps and gurgles.
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